The Family Coffee Dynasty That’s Now Making Some of Italy’s Best Wine

17/07/2017

A third-generation member of the Illy family (of the famous Illycaffè empire) invented the 'dense' vineyard and now produces some of the most highly-coveted wine in Tuscany.

By Adam Lague - Luxury Retreats

The Family Coffee Dynasty That’s Now Making Some of Italy’s Best Wine

A third-generation member of the Illy family (of the famous Illycaffè empire) invented the 'dense' vineyard—and now produces some of the most highly-coveted wine in Tuscany.

Francesco Illy is accomplished, just like the rest of his family. He is part of the third generation of Illys responsible for building a coffee empire started by his grandfather – the original Francesco Illy – in 1933. In 1935, the first Francesco patented the espresso. In the sixties, his son Ernesto invented electronic selection, a system used in all the world’s coffee-growing countries to eliminate defective cherries. In the 1980s, Ernesto’s son Riccardo reinvented illy’s 250g ground coffee tin. And in the 1990s, Ernesto’s brother Francesco (of the third generation) created the first colorful designer home-use espresso machine. Each member of the family has made his or her mark on the company. But for Francesco Illy of present-day, his work outside the family business may be his most significant. After all, he has created the densest vineyard in the world. Thankfully, private vineyard tours and wine tastings mean you can experience it all for yourself.

The World’s Densest Vineyard

Each of Podere le Ripi’s four wines has its own vineyard, soil, density, and quality. Bonsai, a deep ruby red Rosso Di Montalcino, is the most expensive, and it is named as such because of the extreme proximity of its vines. It is the product of a revolutionary technique invented by Illy himself.

In 1997, after a 10-year search, Illy finally bought a home on 55 hectares of land in Montalcino, a Tuscan hill town known for its Brunello wine. The land, known as Podere le Ripi, was flipped to Illy from a selling shepherd, and its soil was completely free of grape vines. Illy was a wine consumer and, prior to moving there, a customer of several wine producers in Montalcino. But he was no winemaker and at first, making wine was not even his intention.

After two years of living on his vast estate with enough room to do about whatever he pleased, he decided he wanted to make his own wine. He started to study and he fell in love with wine production. Winemakers told Illy he would have no luck making a great wine with vines younger than 35 years old. In a business that many are born into, passed down across generation after generation, Francesco Illy was trying to break into the industry at 50 years old. By popular logic, Illy would be able to take his first sip of his own wine around age 90. No, thank you, he said.

Described by his young oenologist Sebastian Nasello as a dreamer and a visionary, Illy decided he needed to expedite the winemaking process, even if it required doing something ridiculous. Between 2000-2010, Illy and his team planted all the vines that would eventually make his Podere le Ripi wine. “The idea was to oblige the vines to come very quickly and very deep with the roots in the soil in order to make a better wine,” Illy says, describing what is now known as the “bonsai technique,” which had technicians, oenologists, and everyone else in the wine business telling him he was crazy.

In Illy’s technique, vines are planted only one foot, four inches apart. Depending whom you ask, standard vine spacing starts around five feet and generally leaves enough room for a tractor to navigate the rows. At Podere le Ripi? “It’s extremely dense. You have difficulty walking inside that vineyard.”

Not only is Bonsai dense, it is the densest vineyard in the world, a fact Illy is proud of considering how absurd his ideas seemed to some, and how they worked out. “By having density, we can increase the competition between the vines. Because they are close and they can’t grow in the top of the surface, they have to dig,” Nasello explains.

Another advantage of Illy’s deep-rooted vines is the ability to maintain humidity. Where surface-level roots are prone to going dry with lack of humid weather, roots that penetrate three meters deep are able to find water even during a dry spell.

Illy recalls, “Everybody said I was crazy and I said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll try, I’ll see what happens.’ When you put them so narrow, one to the other, either they go down with the roots or they die. And they went down. This has been working very well.”

Ellen Rothschild is part owner of a paperless office company based out of New York and Massachusetts. Her family became hooked on wine tours during a 2016 trip to Argentina and Chile. Rothschild and her daughter both gravitate toward Italian wines, while she admits her husband prefers French wines. Staying at Arianna villa in Tuscany’s Chianti Area in June 2017, her personal vacation concierge set her and her family up with a first-time visit to Podere le Ripi. She describes the vineyard as having “a view that you just can’t beat,” and one that she can recreate every time she sips one of Illy’s wines.

The Harmonious Cellar

Podere le Ripi sits next door to Mastrojanni, a historic Brunello estate more than two decades old. (The Illy family would go on to buy the estate in 2008.) In 1997, when Illy moved in, the family had never produced wine, but they had six decades of beverage experience behind them. The original Francesco Illy, grandfather of this Francesco Illy, in 1933 founded the world-renown Italian coffee roasting company illy, specializing in espresso.

The family-owned holding company Gruppo illy SpA would later use a series of acquisitions to extend its branches: along with coffee, they sell jams and marron glacé, or candied chestnuts (Agrimontana, December 2005); chocolate (Domori, 2006); and tea (DammannFrères, 2007). The group’s venture into wine, led by Francesco’s younger brother Riccardo, of Mastrojanni in September 2008 meant each Illy generation had introduced a beverage to the company. Years earlier though, Francesco had already personally begun to experiment with wine. To this day, he is the sole owner of Podere le Ripi and his family has little to do with it.

One Illy did make an incredibly important contribution to the vineyard: architect Ernesto Illy, Francesco’s son, led the project to build Podere le Ripi’s Golden Cellar. In 2003, at only 20 years old, Ernesto designed the first sketches for what would be a 12-year project from start to finish, and resulted in a 750,000-brick, Roman-inspired cathedral of a cellar.

Ernesto’s cellar was built using the Golden Cut, an ancient geometric relationship that inspired the Parthenon’s façade, Dalí’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper, and of course, the measurements of Illy’s cellar. The cellar is made entirely of brick and completely free of cement, which breathes badly, and iron, which would negatively impact the soil beneath it.

Francesco recommends visiting the cellar in small groups to truly appreciate the structure’s beauty. “My feeling is that when you enter this place you feel the harmony,” Illy says. “I feel it. And I see it when people go in there. When you try to feel it, you feel it. It’s something different.”

Il Vino

Podere le Ripi produces and sells 35,000 bottles a year. Despite being the world’s densest, it is a relatively small vineyard that sells primarily to restaurants. His four cornerstone wines are Amore e Follia, Amore e Magia, Lupi e Sirene, and Bonsai, the first of which being a Syrah wine, coming from a dark-skinned grape variety found around the world. The other three are 100% Sangiovese, a red Italian wine grape variety unique to central Italy. Producing wine with an attachment to the region is important to Nasello, who moved away from his hometown of Siena in 2008 to get involved in what he believes is the best wine product in Italy, in Montalcino.

“There are different ways to produce wine, but in Montalcino if you want to create a wine with personality, the process is based on feeling—the feeling of the team, the feeling of the vineyard, the feeling of the land,” Nasello tells me. “I’m not interested in having a wine that is covered by the identity of the winemaker. I’m more interested in having a wine that people can drink and say ‘that’s a great Brunello from the south side of the hill,’ and can recognize the taste of our wine.”

Illy is a naturalist who believes in enriching; his winery has always been organic but in 2010 he decided to begin following biodynamic procedures, a holistic, ecological, and ethical approach to winemaking. “Taking away poison from the soil was one thing, but how do you make the soil rich?” he asks. Now, he says, his plants are better, his grapes are better, and his wines are better.

So is this the best wine in Montalcino? Illy pauses, before concluding: “No.” He ponders a few more seconds, then explains: “I think it’s a very, very good wine but I don’t have the arrogance to say I’m the best. I think I am with the best.”

His vinos are full-bodied, fresh, and neat, he says. They are perfectly clean, highly complex on the aroma spectrum, and have a round, velvety mouth taste.

And—other than to taste his wine—why should anyone visit Podere le Ripi? For the beauty, says Illy. “It’s extremely beautiful and it’s very, very wild with an incredibly beautiful panorama.”

Illy speaks often of beauty, and why wouldn’t he? He lives on 55 acres of a paradise, accompanied by a magnificent wine cellar designed by his son while in his twenties, that houses four wines Francesco can call his own. The moment I speak with him, he is on his boat on the Tyrrhenian Sea near a Sicilian island called Ustica, in the middle of a 2,000-mile, two-month annual journey from Tuscany to his hometown in Italy’s northeast, Trieste. His life is beautiful, but he is intent on sharing it with visitors like Ellen Rothschild, the recent vineyard visitor. She describes herself as someone that enjoys and appreciates wine without being a wine snob. “We really enjoy learning about wine and tasting the differences and sharing it,” she says. Her family liked Podere le Ripi’s product enough to bring home four cases of Brunello.

Francesco Illy never intended to make wine, sell it, guide tours of his vineyard and cellar, and have people travel specifically to taste it. But he did. And he did it in a way nobody believed he could, while creating the world’s densest vineyard. He believes his is among the best wines in the region, and though he won’t lose sleep over not yet being the best, he won’t stop anytime soon.

“My goal is to increase my quality and the excellence of the things I’m doing as far as I can,” says Illy. “This is the goal. If this is going to bring me to make the best wine in Montalcino, I don’t even care. For me, what’s important is that it’s good. That I reach something that I really like.”

04/03/2017

So what makes a coffee baron, Francesco Illy – heir to the Trieste coffee empire – want to set up in Montalcino, a region not known for welcoming new winemakers with open arms? The Buyer sits down with Illy and gets the full story as well as taste his extraordinary wines.

Tasting the full range of Podere Le Ripi wines including a vertical of Lupe e Sirene Brunello Reservas, and the top Bonsai wine that Francesco Illy claims comes from the world’s smallest vines.

Francesco Illy

Montalcino is one of those places where, I’ll just come out with it, they don’t really take kindly to outsiders.

Though there are now over 200 producers within the Consorzio that oversees and regulates production in one of Italy’s most famous wine producing DOCG regions (against just 50 in the early 1980s) production is dominated by the big boys: typically 40% of the DOCG’s annual output comes from just six producers.

New arrivals are made scarce by the high price of land and tough barriers to entry, and the fact many wineries can point to an historic lineage dating back their links to the region for at least a few generations.

Which made the decision by Francesco Illy, heir to the famous Trieste coffee dynasty, to start a winery from scratch so unusual.

Justin Keay gets the lowdown

His critics have suggested he was driven by vanity and deep pockets. He says he was encouraged by a love of the Sangiovese grape and of Brunello di Montalcino in particular, and, it must be said, a desire to make his mark in a field in which he freely admits he had no knowledge.

“Although I had been looking for ten years before I found the Podere Le Ripi site in 1997 (he planted the vines three years later) I was pretty ignorant. Although I loved wine, my background, of course, is coffee. I must be honest: I’ve had a lot of luck,” he says, sitting in front of range of his wines including a vertical of his Brunellos from 2009-2012.

Podere Le Ripi

The first and most important piece of luck was finding such a wonderful site – no easy thing in Montalcino where virtually every square metre of land with wine-growing potential has long been snapped up by local producers.

Podere Le Ripi is a sloping 55 hectare site formerly owned by a shepherd, of which just 12.5% has since been converted to vines, the rest is forest and olive trees, but with wonderful clay and sandstone soil that is perfect for wine-making.

Production increased steadily from 2000 bottles in 2003, the first vintage of Lupi e Sirene, to around 30,000 today, with yields just 50% of the permitted maximum for the Rosso and Brunello wines. The winery converted to fully bio-dynamic methods in 2010.

Three or four wines are produced most years: an IGT Syrah (£22), an IGT Rosso (£22) a Rosso di Montalcino (£30) a Brunello (usually made as a Riserva which requires six months in bottle six years after harvest, priced at £72 a bottle) and a very expensive oddity, what is almost certainly the DOCG’s most expensive Rosso di Montalcino (retailing for £140), Bonsai.

Production increased steadily from 2000 bottles in 2003, the first vintage of Lupi e Sirene, to around 30,000 today, with yields just 50% of the permitted maximum for the Rosso and Brunello wines. The winery converted to fully bio-dynamic methods in 2010.

Three or four wines are produced most years: an IGT Syrah (£22), an IGT Rosso (£22) a Rosso di Montalcino (£30) a Brunello (usually made as a Riserva which requires six months in bottle six years after harvest, priced at £72 a bottle) and a very expensive oddity, what is almost certainly the DOCG’s most expensive Rosso di Montalcino (retailing for £140), Bonsai.

Bonsai is the fruit, so to speak, of one of Francesco’s more controversial moves.

Determined to get the most out of his site and his vines, he opted for vine density in the hope that the vines would take deep root.

Initially he planted 11,000 vines per hectare, more than double the 5000 usually considered optimal by winemakers, and in the experimental vineyard where Bonsai is made, he planted 62,500 vines per hectare, which means this wine is made “from the smallest vines in the world,” just 40 cms apart.

Little wonder that in a typical vintage (the 2010 is currently on release) just 600 bottles of this remarkable and highly concentrated wine gets made.

So how were the wines?

All the Lupe e Sirene Brunello Riservas were tasting great.

These are big wines that obviously get a lot of sun (reflecting Podere le Ripi’s location, to the south-east of Montalcino) and are powerful and fruit forward, with lots of dark berry fruit on the palate but good smooth tannins too.

Tasting a vertical from 2009 to 2012, the 2010 (a great year for Brunello) was perhaps the winner for sheer balance but also power, although the 2011 is more fruit forward, giving up front satisfaction already: these are clearly all young wines with a long, evolutionary life ahead of them. All have remarkable concentration.

But the two best wines for me were two of the most unheralded.

The just-released Lupe e Sirene Brunello 2012 wasn’t made into a Riserva because the vintage wasn’t deemed good enough but it seems that might have been a mistake. This wine is tasting remarkably well already, with lots of layered complexity that had me returning to it on more than one occasion.

A relative bargain at £55 reflecting its non-Riserva status.

The real surprise though was the 2009 Amore e Follia (Love and Madness) Syrah IGT Toscana, a really well made, fruit forward and bold Syrah that Francesco says ages like a Brunello. A fraction of the price though, and great value at just £22.

They may be relative newcomers in one of Italy’s most conservative and protected wine regions, but Francesco and Podere le Ripi clearly have a great future ahead of them, with their Brunellos but also – and especially so – with their IGT wines.

The Italian Winemakers’ Cult

26/10/2016

Is the best way into the world of Italian wine with farmers whosay things like “our work is to enter the rhythm of the planets”?

By Danielle Pergament

The Italian Winemakers’ Cult

Is the best way into the world of Italian wine with farmers whosay things like “our work is to enter the rhythm of the planets”?

By DANIELLE PERGAMENT OCT. 25, 2016

It was a hot, late summer evening in Tuscan wine country — and, unexpectedly, I was getting a lesson in astrology.

Inside a grid of cool, lush green vines, amid hills and valleys rippling toward the horizon, a cherubic woman in a wide straw hat named Helena Variara was pointing toward the sky.

“You have days of fire, air and days of earth — the 12 constellations are our helpers,” she said matter-of-factly. “Our work is to enter the rhythm of the planets.”

Technically speaking, Ms. Variara’s work is also to make wine. She and her partner, Dante Lomazzi, own a tiny winery called Colombaia, tucked onto a hillside of northern Tuscany, outside Siena. “We work the soil on earth days,” Ms. Variara said. “We work the leaves on water days. The sugar in the grapes grows when the moon grows. So we only harvest after a full moon.”

After a pause, she added: “By the way, the water days are also the best days for eating salad.”

Ms. Variara’s practices may seem unorthodox, but her method (better known as biodynamic winemaking) is becoming more and more prominent among a small cohort of Italian winemakers. It follows an ethos composed in the mind of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s, and the tenets are fairly simple: There can be no synthetic chemicals or mechanical irrigation. A true biodynamic farm must also grow a variety of fruits and vegetables, and there have to be animals, either domestic or wild, to keep this miniature ecosystem in check.

And Ms. Variara’s affinity for the constellations is not a personal idiosyncrasy. Biodynamic winemaking also mandates that the farmer adhere to a specific celestial calendar. Hence my astrology lesson.

Sebastian Nasello, the winemaker at Podere Le Ripi in Montalcino, explained it this way: “Organic farming does no harm to the earth. Biodynamic farming aims to make the earth healthier.”

People like Ms. Variara and Mr. Nasello are part of a movement of small vineyards; most produce about 10,000 to 20,000 bottles annually.

As a point of comparison, Goliath vineyards like Antinori, Frescobaldi and the other wines of the duty-free world produce millions of bottles a year and export them all over the world. In 2015, Santa Margherita sold over 19 million bottles in 85 countries, totaling 118,200,000 euros (about $130,000,000) in net sales.

Dante Lomazzi and Helena Variara, Colombaia’s owners, whose biodynamic method of winemaking is becoming more and more prominent among a small cohort of Italian winemakers. Credit Susan Wright for The New York Times

The biodynamic vineyards I visited export a few thousand bottles a year, if any, and the digits of their net sales numbers don’t usually exceed three or four zeros.

Unlike the giants of the wine world, these small, rough-hewed farms add no ingredients besides grapes and time to their wines (with the occasional exception of a pinch of sulfites to preserve the vintage). Where a company like Banfi or Antinori may get truckloads of grapes from all over the region delivered to a sprawling factory that also hosts tour buses, these biodynamic farms generally consist of a farmer, a tractor and maybe a few friends who come to help at harvest time. These farmers are the Davids.

What if the best way into the world of Italian wine was not on a tour bus, but walking through these tiny vineyards with these farmers as guides? It felt like unchartered territory, as if I was unpeeling the unknown side of Italian wine. And, as I would learn, it’s a world that only gets more fascinating the deeper in you go.

Officially, these wineries are not typically open to the public. Unofficially, such winemakers love nothing more than showing off their farms and vintages. For someone who is more traveler than tourist, these wineries provide the perfect entry into a part of Italy we don’t see very often, a part that has been untouched by throngs of tourists and Instagram clichés.

And, perhaps most fascinating of all, there is the deference to the occult.

“We bottle when the moon is descending,” Ms. Variara told me as we walked into her cellar. Each year Colombaia makes two red wines, a cloudy white and a tiny batch of sparkling pink and white wines. “You need the right moon because she’s alive. She knows she’s in a bottle.”

It took me a second to realize we were talking about the wine.

Far be it from me to say “she” isn’t alive. Biodynamic wines may seem like a quirk, a wine-industry outlier, but for the fact that the wine is fantastic.

“Helena’s wine has a soul,” said Brian Heck, a consultant who specializes in biodynamic wines. “It makes you want to be a better person.”

When I heard about people who worked according to a romantic voodoo of reading the phases of the moon, of using stars as a sort of extraterrestrial oenologist, I was fascinated.

Which is how I found myself in Italy (with my husband and two children) seeking out wineries like Colombaia: ones that are more farm than factory, exist in harmony with the land around them, and make some of the most interesting wine in the country.

The entrance to Stefano Amerighi’s winery, near the village of Cortona in Tuscany. Credit Susan Wright for The New York Times“I can’t drink conventional wine,” Gabriele de Prato told me. “I can taste the chemicals. I can taste the temperature control. A conventional wine tastes dead.”

Handsome and tan, with a shaved head, leather bracelets and camouflage shorts, Mr. de Prato looks as if he’d be just as comfortable on the pages of a men’s fashion magazine as strolling through his farm. We were touring Podere Còncori, Mr. de Prato’s vineyard not far from Lucca, in an area known as Garfagnana. Podere Còncori produces several labels, including a syrah, a pinot blanc and (my personal favorite) a rich, elegant pinot nero.

“People think our methods are strange because we use the astrological calendar,” Mr. de Prato said. “But remember that European farmers have always used the moon calendar.”

He almost had me convinced. Until he asked if I had learned to bury a cow horn. By the look on my face, he rightly assumed I had not. “We fill a cow horn with flowers, herbs, manure, like compost,” he said. “We bury it for the winter. It goes into the warm part of the soil closer to the sun’s energy. In the spring we dig it up, mix it with water and spray the vines. It is a natural fertilizer.”

A short while later, Mr. de Prato walked me through his cellar. Between giant steel wine barrels, there was a massive table piled high with lush red tomatoes of all sizes (“You have to have a hundred tomato plants in Tuscany or you’re nobody”). He grabbed a handful of the smallest, rinsed them off and plopped them in a terra-cotta bowl with a sprig of fresh rosemary. It was time to eat.

We sat at the heavy wooden table in his tasting room with those tomatoes, plus platters of crostini, bowls of homemade pasta e fagioli and generous pours of Podere Còncori Melograno. “This is not a simple wine, it is more difficult, but it warms you up,” he told me.

There’s artistry and erudition in this world. It attracts Italians who retreated to the hills to think deep thoughts. Many of the farmers I met with were musicians, some painted, one quoted Ulysses, and all of them tried to educate me.

“You must read Goethe,” said Stefano Amerighi, leaving me to wonder how he knew I hadn’t. We were at his vineyard 150 miles southeast, near the village of Cortona. “‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’ explains our philosophy. Humans waste a lot. With the biodynamic methods you don’t lose anything, you use everything. Goethe will help you understand.”

Mr. Amerighi has long, wavy hair to his shoulders and a graying beard, wears distinguished tortoiseshell glasses and carries a burned-out cigar.

He led me down a dusty path that ran between his lush green vines. Though it was an oppressively hot afternoon, the world inside the vines felt cooler, almost air-conditioned. We arrived at his pasture, home to Mr. Amerighi’s Chianine, the famous white cows that are almost always fated to become bistecca alla Fiorentina.

“Monoculture is not agriculture,” he said stroking one of the cows under her chin. “A farm is like a human: You need a head and a heart and the organs to make the whole organism.”

He pointed to a group of cows gathered in the shade and said: “A few are pregnant. I promised my daughter I would never slaughter our cows. I think soon we will have many cows.”

Before I left, we toured the cellar. And as we walked in the dank air between big barrels of aging syrah, I noticed that the ceramic casks were all covered with chalk drawings of butterflies, stars and rainbows: the blissful, pastel-colored world of a 6-year-old girl. This cellar was a playground.

It was the starkest reminder that we were nowhere near a factory farm. Though they may be separated by hundreds of miles, these farmers are almost family.

“If there is a hailstorm, we call each other and ask advice,” Mr. de Prato had said to me. “There is no rivalry between me and Stefano and Helena and Arianna. I am so impressed with what Arianna has done.”

If this world has a matriarch, it is Arianna Occhipinti, although that’s hardly the word to describe her. Ms. Occhipinti, who started her biodynamic vineyard in southeastern Sicily in 2010, is 33 years old with a tangle of thick black hair, Mediterranean skin and big brown eyes — more Venus than Juno.

Occhipinti is one of the largest producers of biodynamic wine (over 120,000 bottles annually), and it was among the first to be recognized by critics as high-quality wine.

I met Ms. Occhipinti in the courtyard of her winery, not far from the historic city of Ragusa. We sat on wicker chairs surrounded by olive trees and lavender plants and sipped glasses of the Occhipinti Nero d’Avola, a lightly tannic red wine with what wine people call generous fruit.

Farmers like Ms. Occhipinti believe they “have a responsibility to the people of the future,” she said. “We are in a good moment: Young people are making wine, there is more sensibility. The most important thing is to think small, not: production, production, production.”

These biodynamic farms, I was realizing, are self-sustaining idylls. They grow what they need, they don’t produce much waste, they respect the land. I had become a believer.

It was right around that time that I let my small children roam freely — unseen, unsupervised — through the vegetable patch at the Fonterenza winery.

Fonterenza is run by two sisters, Margherita and Francesca Padovani. Fifteen years ago, the Padovani sisters transformed their childhood summer home, a 400-year-old palazzo in the hills of Montalcino, into a kind of winemaking Eden, a swath of Italian paradise removed from all the bad stuff in the world.

My children were pillaging the garden for ripe tomatoes and fallen plums. Through the thicket of cypress trees, I could hear their sounds of laughter, of playing, of a happy childhood. I was feeling pretty smug. Until I heard Margherita’s voice.

“They must watch out for vipers! They must! Children! If you see a snake, stomp the ground very hard!”

In an instant: a change of heart. Maybe chemicals aren’t all bad? Sensing maternal panic, Francesca suggested we go into town, Sant’Angelo in Colle, for lunch.

From the edge of the centuries-old hilltop town, the Italian countryside was laid out before us like a verdant patchwork quilt stitched together by dirt roads. We walked up to the main piazza, where one lonely child was walking around with a soccer ball as if certain there must be another child nearby who wanted to play. Farther on a man in an apron yelled something very loud at the window of an ancient building. The last time there was a census here, in 2011, the population was 204.

There were 10 of us for lunch: my husband, his parents, our children, the sisters Padovani, Margherita’s husband, John, and their infant daughter. We had pushed together a few tables on the terrace of Il Pozzo, a small trattoria serving classic Tuscan food. Under a canopy of white umbrellas, late summer sunlight poured in.

“Here wine is food: It’s our culture, our history,” Francesca said. “The wine has always been made by the farmers, not people who thought of themselves as winemakers. It is nothing but grape juice.”

“As it should be,” her sister said, finishing the thought.

The waiter laid out platters of warm, crisp fiori di zucca and insalata caprese, while Francesca filled our glasses with Fonterenza Rosso di Montalcino. (The proprietors of the restaurant hardly seemed to mind that Francesca had brought her own bottles.)

“The big vineyards make wine that always tastes the same,” Francesca said. “That’s not wine. Wine is about finding the beauty of the vintage, finding its personality: 2014 was a cold, difficult vintage; 2015 was the opposite — full and ripe and feminine. It should always tell a story.”

A short while later, the waiter placed bowls of pici al ragù and pici all’aglione in front of us, and Francesca stood to pour the Fonterenza Brunello di Montalcino around the table. Slow, heavy church bells reminded us it was midday, and gradually the sky clouded over. The landscape grew darker and a small stream of sunlight beamed directly onto a field of haystacks in the distance like a laser. The gods were playing favorites.

Instantly, the farmers knew what the rest of us did not.

“Grab your things — it’s going to pour,” Margherita said, wrapping her baby in a blanket and getting up from the table.

A second later, it was biblical, pelting the umbrellas like punishment. Rivers of rainwater gushed down the street. We all ran inside for cover (and caffe macchiati) — all but my children, who ran directly into the piazza, which had been transformed into a makeshift Tuscan water park.

I watched them jumping in puddles, arms outstretched, willing more rain to fall. Margherita stood next to me, shifting her infant daughter to her shoulder. I asked her if it was difficult to be a woman in her industry.

“People didn’t think we could do it,” she said. “And we didn’t know much. We planted half a hectare of cabernet sauvignon. That didn’t work. And if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have broken so much machinery. But we believed we were doing the right thing.”

Theirs is a romantic undertaking. These young farmers with their tanned skin and leather bracelets are living a kind of bohemian utopia: Make beautiful wine using only the tools Mother Earth provides. Let the moon and the stars be your guide. Think small and waste nothing. Listen to music and read Goethe. And when winter comes, bury your secrets in the soil.

“The biggest misconception is that this is witchcraft. It is not witchcraft,” Mr. de Prato had said to me, smiling for a moment. “Well, maybe a little.”

Event at Del Posto New York

10/10/2016

It is with great pleasure we invite you to our special event Thursday 3rd November at Restaurant Del Posto in New York to present the new vintages of Podere Le Ripi.

Francesco Illy’s Podere Le Ripi produces one of the most appreciated wines in Italy on the densest vineyard in the world. The eldest son of the third generation of Italy’s famed espresso giant, Illy is no stranger to creating superior products.

It was in 1984 when Illy’s soul was captured by Montalcino’s breathtaking landscape. “Beauty produces harmony, and harmony delivers quality of life to everyone. Here I found beauty and harmony.”

Illy’s biodynamic approach allows his grape varieties to be a true and unique expression of the region.

Join Francesco Illy for this singular opportunity to explore his illustrious, robust yet elegant wines. The wines will be complemented by a five-course menu created by James Beard Award-winning chef Mark Ladner.